From TIME:  August 31,1981:

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Along with diet books, cat books, and advisories on how to make
a profit from the coming apocalypse, there is a growing shelf
concerned solely with mastering that infuriating, six sided,
27-part boggler with 42.3 quintillion possible combinations known
as Rubik's Cube.. The latest entry: ''You Can Do The Cube''
(Penguin, $ 1.95) by Patrick Bossert, 13, a London schoolboy who
discovered the cube only this spring during a family ski vacation
in Switzerland. Within five days he had mastered the monster,
and later began selling his schoolmates a four-page, mimeographed
tip sheet for 45 cents. An alert editor at Penguin saw a copy and
persuaded the prodigy to turn pro. The 112 page result contains
3 dozen 'tricks' for solving the cube (using logic rather than
math), as well as a chapter on 'Cube Maintenance' (to loosen a
stiff cube, ''put a blob of Vaseline on the mechanism''). With
250,000 copies of the cubist's book in print, a Penguin executive
marvels: ''It's the biggest, runaway, immediate success we have
had since we published 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' in paperback.''

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-Rob.